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Playboy Interview: Johnny Depp

by Kevin Cook
Photographs by Kim Mizuno
Playboy
January 1996

A
candid conversation with America's quirkiest actor about Kate Moss,
River Phoenix, his offbeat films and why he likes to stick strange
things in his pants.

Johnny
Depp looks rotten. Or so he says. The women on
Sunset Boulevard would
surely disagree. Many of them would marry him on the spot. But then
Depp seldom bows to majority opinion. As he lights another cigarette
and drinks more coffee at a bookstore cafe on Sunset, his attention
flits to a bee—a killer bee encased in Lucite. It's one of many
oddball souvenirs he receives from friends and admirers. Bugs are
serious business to Depp, who collects exotic paraphernalia. His
career—the other subject under discussion at the table—is taken
more lightly. Acting, he explains, is nothing but "making faces
for cash." Others take his work more seriously. Depp is "one
of the great young actors," says European director Emir
Kusturica. Marlon Brando, Vincent Price and Faye Dunaway have said
the same. Brando says that Depp should do Shakespeare, while Dunaway
claims he is both a superb actor and a super kisser. The on-screen
Depp is the world's greatest lover; offscreen he's a famed romancer
of actresses and supermodels. "He doesn't belong in show
business," his Ed Wood co-star Sarah Jessica Parker
once
remarked. "He belongs somewhere better." Lasse Hallstrom,
who directed him in What's Eating Gilbert Grape,
says, "He
has real ambitions, but he is deeply afraid of being considered
pretentious."

And
one other
thing: He looks great in a dress.

At
32, Johnny Depp is entering the heart of what he calls, with casual
self-deprecation, "my quote-unquote career." His is a goofy
oeuvre, perhaps most impressive because he's carved a unique niche
without making a box office hit. Thus far, the Kentucky-born Depp has
made misfit movies. He was a boy monster in Edward
Scissorhands,
top-hatted oddball in Benny & Joon, keeper
of a retarded
brother in What's Eating Gilbert Grape and the
unsinkable
cross-dressing director in Ed Wood. Nobody plays
human frailty
like Depp. Even though he made women swoon in Don Juan DeMarco,
he played the fabled lover as a committed loon.

His
new films are John Badham's Nick of Time, in which
he plays an
accountant turned assassin, and Dead Man, an eerie
Jim
Jarmusch Western that is scheduled for release later this year. Even
after opting for Dead Man over the slick epic Mobsters,
a choice that cost him millions of dollars, he was criticized when he
signed to star in Badham's thriller. Industry watchers thought he was
doing "the Keanu thing," foregoing his traditional quirky
roles for a commercial blockbuster. But for Depp, Nick of Time
is no typical action flick. It's one of the first films since
Hitchcock's Rope to tell its tale in real time,
each screen
minute equaling 60 seconds of his character's strife. And it's his
task in the film to gun down a female governor. Still, thriller is as
thriller seems, and if the film is a hit, Depp will probably be
charged with cynicism.

That's one
crime he has not committed. Drug use and hotel abuse, perhaps, but
not calculation. Which may be why Depp made the difficult transition
from teen hunk on TV's 21 Jump Street eight years
ago to film
star. Along the way, he has escaped the trivia heap by making brave,
eccentric movie choices. Imagine David Cassidy as Gilbert Grape.
Picture Kirk Cameron as an assassin. Or better yet, consider Richard
Grieco, Depp's megacool Jump Street co-star, as a
name anyone
would recognize.

Depp can be
equally defined by the roles he didn't take.
He reportedly spurned
Keanu Reeves' part in Speed, Brad Pitt's role in Legends
of
the Fall and Lestat in Interview With the Vampire .
Of
course, Tom Cruise played Lestat—a neat twist, because Cruise is
said to have refused the role of Edward Scissorhands
because
Edward, while cutting edge, wasn't handsome.

Depp
says he respects Cruise but has no interest in "the Tom Cruise
thing"—box office godhood. He can now command $4 million per
film but often takes far less for pet projects, including his friend
Jarmusch's Dead Man.

He
has danced to his own drummer since his 1984 debut in A
Nightmare
on Elm Street, in which he got sucked through a bed into
hell.
Along the way he has fallen for some of America's most desirable
women. He has had offscreen relationships with Jennifer Grey (Dirty
Dancing) and Sherilyn Fenn (Twin Peaks). A
rumored
liaison—public, if not pubic—with Madonna was followed by a
notorious engagement to Winona Ryder and the requisite tattoo, WINONA
FOREVER. When they broke up, he had the tattoo removed a letter at a
time; at one point it read WINO FOREVER.

Today
he and his latest love, ubermodel Kate Moss, are the prom king and
queen of young Hollywood—beautiful, thin chainsmokers with an air of
sex and tragedy. Or call them, thanks to their morbid humor, the new
Gomez and Morticia. Johnny once made a shrine in his movie-set
trailer, placing candles around a photo of Kate with a bride of
Frankenstein hairdo.

Their
hangout, the Viper Room on Sunset Boulevard, which Johnny co-owns,
was the scene of River Phoenix' fatal overdose in October 1993. The
horror of that Halloween has faded, and today's Viper Room more than
ever resembles its owners: notorious and nice. "It's a fun place
again," he says, passing the strip of cement where Phoenix died,
"but you never forget."

Depp
is all about his past. In 1970, when he was
seven years old, his
family left Kentucky for Miramar, Florida, where the Depps moved from
house to house and sometimes lived in motels. Depp's father took off
when Johnny was 15. His mother, Betty Sue, worked as a waitress, and
Johnny counted her tips after work. He also developed a fierce
devotion to society's outcasts.

In
high school he was suspended for mooning a teacher. Shortly after
that he dropped out and worked pumping gas. Once, trying to learn to
breathe fire like circus performers, he blew a mouthful of gasoline
at a flame. His eyes lit up as the blaze raced toward him—then his
eyebrows and hair lit up, too. He barely escaped.

To
"get an identity" (and meet girls) he joined a band. He
played guitar with the Kids, a group that was good enough to open for
the Ramones, the Talking Heads, Iggy Pop and the B-52s. They went to
Los Angeles to make it in the big time but flopped instead. Depp
needed work. That's when Nicolas Cage, a pal from the music scene,
said, "You should meet my agent."

Depp
auditioned for director Wes Craven. Legend has it Craven's daughter,
with whom Depp ran lines that day, fell in love with the new kid in
town. He won a role in Craven's Elm Street, which
led to
Private Resort, a 1985 teen sexploitation pic in
which his
bare butt played second banana to then-unknown Rob Morrow. Next came
stardom.

As a narc on 21 Jump
Street, Fox TV's first hit, Depp became a poster boy to
female
teen America. He hated every minute of it. As soon as he was free of
his contract, he spat on his Jump Street image by
starring in
John Waters' spoof Cry-Baby.

The
grungy offscreen Depp is fascinated by the macabre. He is a student
of the nether zones of biology and the extremes of abnormal
psychology. (He recently bought Bela Lugosi's old house for $2.3
million.) He collects skeletons, paintings of scary clowns and, as
mentioned, bugs. As with his work, there is a twitchy humor to his
collectibles, his conversation, even his arrests. They're all funny
if you view them as he does—as brief excursions on our common march
to the graveyard. In 1994 he was jailed for trashing a $1200-a-night
suite in New York City's Mark Hotel. Handcuffed and led by police to
a sidewalk jammed with reporters demanding his reaction, he nodded
toward the cops and said, "I've met some really nice people."

Is Depp a nice person? We decided
to send Contributing Editor Kevin Cook to find out. His
report:

"Johnny Depp often
runs late. To him, a watch would be a handcuff. So I was pleased when
he showed up less than an hour after the time we had arranged. He
shook my hand and apologized, saying he had run his motorcycle into a
pink Ford Escort.

He led me into
the quiet, dark Viper Room—black walls, mirrors, black upholstered
booths. The booths are marked with brass plaques engraved with the
names of preferred guests and a warning to interlopers: DON'T FUCK
WITH IT. The place was empty in the early afternoon. We went
downstairs to Depp's sanctum, where we sat on a couch near a
closed-circuit TV that monitors the club above. We talked all day. I
was impressed by his intelligence and earnestness. He was often
tongue-tied, struggling to shoehorn his convoluted thoughts into
sentences. Watching him grope for words, I couldn't help rooting for
him to unearth the mots justes he was trying for.

A
minor point: Depp's Viper Room co-owner, Chuck E. Weiss, who happens
to be the eponym of Rickie Lee Jones' song Chuck E's in Love,
has joked that Johnny is such an artistic, sensitive person that he
'sits on the toilet and pees like a woman.' But it's not so. We did
about a minute of this interview in their club's men's room, and I
can assure you he's a stand-up guy."

PLAYBOY:
You have only one urinal. Does the Viper Room men's room get crowded
on weekends?

JOHNNY DEPP:[Nods]
It used to get wet. There was a guy who would somehow sneak in here
with a monkey wrench. He would loosen a nut on the urinal so that
when the next person flushed, water would go everywhere. It was like
Niagara Falls. You had people running from the bathroom, slipping,
security guys sprinting over to throw down towels. This happened
fairly regularly for weeks, and I came to respect the toilet guy. I
liked his method, his consistency. He clearly took pride in toilet
sabotage. But then it stopped, and I kind of miss him.

Why do you call the place
the Viper Room?

After
a group of musicians in the Thirties who called themselves Vipers.
They were reefer heads and they helped start modern music. [Lights
a cigarette] You know one great thing about having your own
club?
You get free matches.

Do you have any plans to
quit smoking?

Nah. I think if you find something
you're good
at, you should stick with it. I have switched to lights, though. It
got to where I would wheeze going up a flight of stairs, so I went to
diet cigarettes.

You've been accused of
selling out—"doing the Keanu thing,"
as one critic said—for making Nick of Time.

Who cares? I'm interested in story
and character
and doing things that haven't been done a zillion times. When I read
Nick of Time I could see the guy mowing the grass,
watering
his lawn, putting out the Water Wiggle in the backyard for his kid,
and I liked the challenge of playing him. He's nothing like me. And I
wanted to work with John Badham because he made Saturday
Night
Fever and invented some interesting ways of shooting. Nick
of
Time is a thriller, and it gives me a chance to play a
straight,
normal, suit-and-tie guy.

If you wanted
big money you could have also made Mobsters,
a
potential hit. You've turned down other mainstream films for movies
such as Dead
Man. How much
did that one pay?

Less than my expenses during the
shoot. But it's
a poetic film. I did Dead Man so I could work with
Jim
Jarmusch. I trust Jim as a director and a friend and a genius.

How do you see
your
career? Is it something you're sculpting as you go along, a body of
work?

It's
more primitive. I look at the story and the character and say, "Can
I add any ingredients to make a nice soup?" In some sense there
is a monofilament running through the guys I've played. They are
outsiders. They're people society says aren't normal, and I think you
have to stand up for people like that. But I didn't plan it. It's not
like I had to play them. Except for Don Juan, I had to play that guy,
and Edward Scissorhands. I loved Edward. He was total honesty.
Honesty is what matters, and I have an absurd fascination with it,
whether it means being true to your girl, your work or yourself.

You weren't on the
list for Scissorhands until Tim Burton met you and
was won
over. Did he ever say what he detected in the former star of 21
Jump Street?

Tim isn't the type to verbalize it,
but in
snippets of conversations he has said it had to do with my eyes. My
eyes looked like I carried more years than I had lived. He also felt
my looks were deceptive, because I wasn't what people thought.

What was that?

Oh, whatever catchphrase they sew onto your back.

Heartthrob?

Yeah. Or confident actor.

Are you a method actor? Are
you in character between takes?

No, and I don't buy it when a guy
says, "You
must call me Henry the Eighth. Even when I go get a Dr Pepper I am
Henry the Eighth!" I can't see that. If you're truly in
character it becomes unconscious. If you realize you're in character
or say you are, then you're fucked. It means that you're satisfied,
and that's the worst.

Your eccentric films make
people wonder if you're allergic to
box
office success. Aren't you tempted to make one big score, one Batman,
to bankroll your pet projects?

That demon has visited me. He's my best pal. He says, "Look,
make two movies that are obvious commercial vehicles, blockbusters,
and you'll have the freedom to do smaller independent or experimental
films. You can build an audience and bring it into that new
world—open some minds." I've thought that, but I don't believe
it. I would feel untrue to myself, untrue to the people who
appreciate the choices I've made. For me the career thing has to be a
little purer, more organic.

And you are happy with your
choices?

Maybe I was trying to do movies for good reasons—to make
something I
believed in—but I never thought of them as small, eccentric films.
To me, Ed Wood wasn't a small film even if it
ultimately made
ten dollars.

You were
shooting Divine Rapture, an unusual film
co-starring Marlon
Brando, when financing collapsed, production stopped and everyone was
sent home.

That
sucked. One minute we're filming, the next minute there's no money.
It was like being in the middle of sex, right at the peak, and a guy
walks in with a gun: "Stop it now." That's when you feel
shitty, because you remember it's the movie business, based on money.

Brando used to say he
was so disgusted with the business that he didn't care anymore, he
just wanted the money.

If he could do that, I applaud it. If
I could do
a bunch of movies and make zillions of dollars and not care, why not?
I just can't do it now. It's probably ridiculous the way I talk about
honesty and shit when really, what am I being true to? Some company.
A bunch of guys who invest in a movie. They buy the product and
distribute it. That's not so pure. It's art and commerce, oil and
water, and here I am in some sort of artistic frenzy. Maybe I'm just
very naive. Twenty minutes from now I'll probably say fuck it and
sell out completely.

Do you remember the first
time you saw yourself-on-screen?

I got sick. I went to see dailies on Nightmare on
Elm Street.
I was 21, and didn't know what was going on. It was like looking in a
huge mirror. It wasn't how I looked that bothered me, though I did
look like a geek in that movie. It was seeing myself up there
pretending.

And you heaved?

I didn't actually vomit, but I felt like vomiting.

These days when
Hollywood makes you sick, you and Kate Moss
run off
to London or Paris. What are you escaping from?

Fame, celebrity—it's not such a big
deal in
Europe. People seem to understand that you just have a weird job.
They're not running after you trying to carve chunks out of you. It's
strange in the States. Most fans here are great, but there's a
handful who have seen the movies and feel they know you. They think
it's all right to touch you and ask personal questions.

Like we're doing now.

But I'm selective about my interviews. I may quit doing them,
too, because I always feel violated afterward. And stupid, for
talking about myself for hours and hours.

You want the job but not the
flashbulbs.

Look, I used to work construction. I've pumped gas and sold
T-shirts in my adult life, and there's nothing worse than some rich
actor saying, "Oh, my life is so hard." I'm lucky to have
this job. And celebrity, fame, whatever that stuff is, is a hazard of
the job. Maybe I should do what Brando did 30 years ago. Buy an
island. Maybe take my girl and some friends and just go there and
sleep. And read and swim and think clear thoughts. Because you really
can't do that here. You can't be normal, not with people hitting you
up at any given moment with bizarre requests. You can't just hang out
and have a cup of coffee and pick your nose or [reaching for
his crotch] adjust your package, you know?

You should be a baseball
player.

Right. I could spit and grab my crotch. Like that lady who
sang the national anthem—what's her name?

Roseanne.

I liked that. It was ballsy of her.

So there's an island on your
Christmas list?

If there's anything I really want,
it's privacy.
It's the island idea. You do get to where your money can help your
family, and that's a great thing. You can buy that wristwatch you
want, too. But mostly you now have to pay for simplicity. You use
your money to buy privacy because during most of your life you aren't
allowed to be normal. You're on display, always looked at, which puts
you at a disadvantage for the people looking at you know that it's
you. They say, "It's you!" But you don't know them. That's
bad for an actor because the most important thing you can do is
observe people. And now you can't because you're the one being
observed.

Some
of it
must be enjoyable.

It's
very nice when people come up and say, "I really liked Don
Juan DeMarco, please sign my napkin." What gets to me is
being watched, whispered about. Would you ever walk up to someone on
the street and say, "Can I kiss you?" No, you'd get
smacked. "Can I look inside your wallet?" "What size
is your shoe?" "Can I have your hat?" Some requests
are too fucking surreal. On Dead Man I was hanging
out with
Jarmusch and the crew, smoking cigarettes, and there was a guy
lurking, checking me out. He looked normal enough, but his eyes were
a little too open. So I knew he'd come up to me, which he did. "Hi,
Johnny! Wanna go have a drink?" I said, "Thanks, I'm OK."
He said, "Listen, you could really help me out. My wife and I
are separating, but I want to get back with her. She's a big fan of
yours." He wanted me to go home with him and mediate his
divorce. I wouldn't, so he said he'd call her on the phone and we
could talk it out. Now, that stuff goes too far. You want to say,
"Can't we just kiss? Could you just shove your tongue down my
gullet and be done with it?"

Some female fans
love you enough to send you highly personal
mementos.

Nude pictures in the mail, yes. Tons
of them.
Some are beautiful—nicely lit, black-and-white, mysterious. Some are
out-and-out primitive. Then there are the pubes. I've gotten a lot of
pubic hairs in the mail. I don't save them. I guess you could get
ritualistic about it, burn the pubes in a fire, but I'm not sure I
want to touch them so I throw them away.

How does it feel to be so
handsome that women yank out their pubes for you?

I
have no control over that. It's demeaning when people talk about my
looks. I think I usually look like shit, and most people would
probably agree.

You once said
you feel more comfortable dining in a movie than
in a
restaurant.

Calmer, anyway. In a real restaurant you may notice people
talking under
their breath, staring. It builds up in your head and you want to run.

Do you and Kate have
techniques for avoiding bad scenes?

If we run into a gaggle of paparazzi
I'll avoid
eye contact. I'll also put on my sunglasses. That way they don't get
paid as much for the picture.

Are you and Kate going to
get married?

I love Kate more than anything.
Certainly enough
to marry her. But as far as putting our names on paper, making weird
public vows that signify ownership—it's not in the cards.

Are you monogamous?

I'm very true. I wouldn't hurt her and I expect she wouldn't
hurt me.
Fidelity is important as long as it's pure. But the moment it goes
against your insides—if you want to be somewhere else, if she wants
to dabble—then you need to make a change. I'm not sure any human
being is made to be with one person forever and ever, amen. My own
parents didn't do it; my dad left when I was 15. And maybe in some of
my public relationships . . . maybe I was trying to right the wrongs of
my parents by creating a classic fairy-tale love. Trying to solve the
fear of abandonment we all have. Anyway, it didn't work. That's not
to say I didn't love those people. I have been with some great girls
and I certainly thought I loved them, though now I have my doubts. I
felt something intense, but was it love? I don't know. So now I can't
say I can love someone forever, or if anybody can.

According to a
recent story, you and Kate had set a wedding
date. She
wanted engraved invitations, but you wanted to send out a riddle so
your friends would have to guess where to show up.

It's fiction. I can guarantee you
that if I woke
up one day with a wild hair up my ass to get hitched, there wouldn't
be invitations. We'd run out and do it.

What do you think when you see Kate's picture on a
billboard?

I think she's beautiful.
Calvin Klein is lucky to have her. If we're apart and I see her
picture I'll miss her, not because of a billboard but because she's
always on my mind anyway.

What's something she does better than you?

Modeling. And she's great at games. She beats the shit out of
me
at gin rummy. Kate is a great girl, very smart. We're a good team
because she's a light sleeper. You could hit me with a baseball bat
and I wouldn't wake up. But she'll wake up: "Was that a pin
dropping?" So I get some protection.

Does all the gossip bother you?

It's part of the game. You know that
the
tabloids—from the obvious ones to the subtler ones such as Time and
Newsweek—will print anything to sell those fuckers. But you hear it
and it can be stressful. Suppose you and I are at a bar, and you say
hello to a girl. That's innocent. For me the same thing becomes: They
were dangling from the St. James Hotel with hairbrushes sticking out
of their asses. That can cause a strain.

You mean that it wasn't the St. James?

Sorry, never happened. Here's another one: Kate and I had a
huge
fight at a hotel in New York, a real screaming match in the lobby. It
was in the papers. I thought it was pretty magical of us, for we were
in France at the time.

What happened on September 13, 1994, when you smashed up a room at
New York's Mark Hotel?

Another instance of not being allowed to be normal. I was
having
a bad day. I think we all have those, but if somebody else does what
I did it's not usually in the news. A security guy came to my door,
and I said, basically, "I'm sorry, I broke some things. I'll
repay you." But that's not good enough. I go to jail. And the
next day this gets equal billing with the invasion of Haiti, me
beating up a hotel room. Imagine if I had hit somebody.

That clearly bothered you.

[With an Ed Wood grin] It's all in a day's
work!

Don't you invite it,
though, by dating famous people? How come celebs fall in love only
with other celebs?

Probably because you have mutual friends. You move in the
same circles. It's like working in a factory—you strike up friendships
with other employees. Also, you'll go to a restaurant or a bar that
caters to other people who know what it's like to be exposed. So
maybe they're not after you so much.

With the Viper Room you've bought your own hideout.

It's easier here. I'll have a couple
beers or a
glass of wine, get up and play my guitar with some friends. Every
Thursday is martini night, a good time. One of the best nights for me
was when Johnny Cash played here.

He must have matched the black decor.

Yeah, he was brilliant and he blended in.
He was just a
head floating up there—beautiful.

The tabs have linked you with other celebrities,
including
Madonna.

I read
that I was in bed with her, which is a ton of shit. I have met her
and it went like this: "How do you do?" "Hello, how
are you?" Now when anyone asks about my affair with Madonna I
say no, wrong—it was the Pope. He swept me off my feet.

For the record, how did you get under the robes of
John Paul
II?

Well,
he's shy. I didn't want to push too hard, but we shared a bottle of
wine and I can tell you, the man is a great kisser. Watch him when he
gets off a plane. He'll really give that runway a good one.

You're known for dodging attention by using fake
names when
you check
into hotels. But your pseudonyms make good copy. Mr. Donkey
Penis?

It's just
that if you register as Mr. Poopy, for instance, you get a funny
wake-up call. I used to use the name Mr. Stench; it was funny to be
in a posh hotel and hear a very proper concierge call out, "Mr.
Stench, please!" I never really stayed under the name Donkey
Penis. That was an example I mentioned to a reporter once. But I have
been Roid, Emma Roid.

You've said journalistic "fictions" bother you. What
has
been the worst?

When something heavy happens and nine
out of ten
magazines turn it into a fucking vulture fest. They turn you
into something sick.

You're talking about River Phoenix.

When River passed away, it happened to be at my club. Now
that's
very tragic, very sad, but they made it a fiasco of lies to sell
fucking magazines. They said he was doing drugs in my club, that I
allow people to do drugs in my club. What a ridiculous fucking
thought! "Hey, I'm going to spend a lot of money on this
nightclub so everyone can come here and do drugs. I think that's a
good idea, don't you? We'll never get found out. It's not like this
place is high profile or anything, right?" That
lie was
ridiculous and disrespectful to River. But aside from River, and his
family trying to deal with their loss, what about people who work in
the club? They have moms and dads in, like, Oklahoma, reading about
the place where their daughter tends bar and thinking, Jesus, she's
out in Hollywood swimming around with these awful creatures!

Meaning you.

It was awful for my nieces and nephews to read that stuff, to
have every two-bit pseudojournalist speculating
viciously . . . viciously. And it hurt.

How did you cope?

I
closed the club for a few nights. To get out of the way so River's
fans could bring messages, bring flowers. And I got angry. I made a
statement to the press: "Fuck you. I will not be disrespectful
to River's memory. I will not participate in your fucking circus."

Is it haunting to
walk past the spot where River died?

At first it was. I couldn't go to the club without thinking
of
it. Later I came to terms with the fact that it had nothing to do
with the club. He was here a very short time. It had nothing to do
with anything, really, except that what he ingested was bad, and now
there is nothing we can do.

Did you shed tears that night?

That's a weird question.

You don't have to answer.

Yes. I shed tears when I heard
someone had died.
It wasn't until later, four or five in the morning, that they told me
it was River. It's so sad to see a young life end. And now I'm
starting to feel like I'm on The Barbara Walters Special.
Are
you going to make me cry?

Catching lightning bugs. Beautiful, fascinating bugs. There
was a
little girl who lived next door who had a brace on her leg. We used
to play on the swing set, and the night the astronauts landed on the
moon, her father came out and looked up and said, in all seriousness,
"When man sets foot on the face of the moon, the moon will turn
to blood." I was shocked. I remember thinking, Geez, I'm six and
that's a little deep for me. I stayed up watching the moon. It was a
big relief when it didn't change.

Didn't you have an uncle who was a Bible-thumping
preacher?

Yes.
That gave me an odd sense of religion. He was theatrical in the
pulpit. He would start crying, praising the Lord. Pretty soon the
adults were screaming hallelujah, getting on their hands and knees,
crawling up to kiss his shoes, and I just didn't buy it. I'm not
saying my uncle was full of shit, because he was a good guy. I just
didn't like the duality—seeing him behave normally at home and a
whole different way in the pulpit. It was too convenient. Why did the
Lord strike you only in church? Why didn't he hit you in the bathroom
or when you were barbecuing hot dogs?

As a boy, did you think you were headed for big
things? Did
you ever
want to be a movie star?

At four or five I fancied myself a
Matt Helm,
the spy Dean Martin played. I also wanted to be Flint—James Coburn.
Those guys got all the women.

Were you geeky as a kid?

I'm geeky now. I sure don't look
around and say,
"Hey, isn't this great?" I've never felt that and probably
never will.

Did you
like your name? It's a great movie name, but a kid might rather be
Johnny Jones.

It
spawned nicknames. I was Johnny Dip. Deppity Dog. Dippity-Do. I
didn't mind it, and didn't really think about it until my first
movie, when they asked how I wanted to be billed. John Depp? It
sounds pumped up. I was always Johnny.

You were a kid when the family moved from Kentucky to
Miramar,
Florida.

We moved
like gypsies. From the time I was five until my teens we lived in 30
or 40 different houses. That probably has a lot to do with my
transient life now. But it's how I was raised so I thought there was
nothing abnormal about it. Wherever the family is, that's home. We
lived in apartments, on a farm, in a motel. Then we rented a house,
and one night we moved from there to the house next door. I remember
carrying my clothes across the yard and thinking, This is weird, but
it's an easy move.

Were you a bully? Ever beat up anyone?

The guys I hung out with in my early teens were bullies, kind
of,
so I did a little of that. Picking on someone, pushing people around.
I didn't like it. It got me so angry that I'd be on the poor guy's
side.

Meanwhile, you
hated school—

I wasn't learning. I felt the
teachers were
there to kill eight hours and get paid. I had more fun playing
guitar. I was playing in a band in nightclubs at an early age, and
that was an education.

How old were you when you lost your virginity?

I was about 13, playing guitar at a
club, and
this girl who was a little older had been hanging around listening to
us. She was a virgin, too. That night we
just . . . partook. It was in
the bass player's van, a blue Ford. I knew what to do—I had studied
the subject for many years. And I remember us laughing, having a good
time together. It's a sweet, sweet memory. She became my girl for a
while, but then we lost touch. I haven't seen her in a long time,
about 19 years.

You
were 15 when your parents split up. Were you crushed?

There wasn't time. It was too traumatic for my mom.

Betty Sue—her
name is on the heart tattoo on your left arm.

She got very ill. Her life as she had
known it
for 20 years was over. Her partner, her husband, her best friend, her
lover, had just left her. I felt crushed that he had left, but when
you're faced with something like that, it's amazing how much abuse
the human mind and heart can take. You just get past what you need to
get past. Sure, on some level I was thinking, Wait a minute, what
happened to my family? What about stability, the safety of the home?
But my feelings were secondary to thinking about my mom. All the
focus was on her getting through that time, which she finally did,
and now everyone is pretty OK. I'm even on good terms with my dad.

At the time,
though,
you were subject to various fears.

Oh, yes. My sister Christi had a baby
when I was
17, and I had just heard about crib death. The horrible thing was
that it wasn't understood. For some unknown reason the baby would
stop breathing. So I would sneak into where the baby was sleeping and
put my hand in her crib, hold her little finger, and I'd sleep on the
floor like that. It was stupid, I'm sure. But I thought the warmth of
my hand might help, that maybe if she felt my pulse it would remind
her to breathe.

You
were sensitive.

A total paranoid.

You dropped out of high school about that time. Did
the other
Depps try to talk you out of it?

No, they were supportive. It was
other people,
family friends, who thought I was a shithead. They figured I was
proving them right by dropping out of school to play guitar in
nightclubs. And I thought maybe they were right. My main feeling when
I left school was one of insecurity. It was, What the fuck am I gonna
do? I'm nobody. I'm a fuckup, just like those outside voices say. I
seriously considered joining the Marines because I didn't want to be
a fuckup. I thought that if I joined the Marines and learned to deal
with authority, maybe I could be a normal guy.

Then why aren't you crewcut Colonel Depp today?

My band had some success.

You were 17. Your band, the Kids, rubbed shoulders
with major
acts
when they toured Florida. There's a famous tale about you and Iggy
Pop.

We opened for
the Ramones, the Pretenders, the Talking Heads. One night we opened
for Iggy. It went great. After the show I was pretty drunk, and in
the Iggy tradition I wanted more, so I started screaming at him. Just
sophomoric insults: "Iggy Poop! Who the fuck are you? Iggy
Slop!" He got in my face and said, "You little turd."
And walked away. So of course I was delighted. I looked over at the
bass player and said, "Yeah, that was Iggy. He's a god."

A few years later
he
played a supporting role in Cry-Baby. Did he
remember
you?

No.
He said he didn't remember much from those years.

Pretty soon after that you went out west with the
band.

We got bored in south Florida. We had
to move to
Los Angeles to make it big. I remember the drive out. Driving 18
hours at a stretch, you hit a kind of hallucinatory state of sleep
deprivation that sends you into orbit. You blink and look up and
you're driving into the devil's mouth. It was a good time. You have
high hopes because you're not thinking of yourself as a self but as a
band member, that great camaraderie. Then, before you know it, you're
on your own.

But the
band shattered on contact with the big time?

We broke up, and I couldn't lean on
the drummer or the bass player anymore. It was all me. I had to
deliver.

So what was your
first step?

I sold pens.

On the street?

It
was marketing—working the phone from a big stuffy building in
Hollywood, near Hollywood and Vine. The best thing about that job was
using the phone—I'd call my family in Florida on the pretext of
selling them pens. The boss, the pen boss, would circle the room, but
when he went by I'd say, "How many pens would you like, 288? Two
gross?" After he passed I'd whisper, "Mom, are you there?"
The free phone calls were fine, but the sales pitch was a batch of
lies. Telling people they could win a trip to Greece or a beautiful
grandfather dock. So I learned my pen-selling script—it was really
my first acting gig—and then ad-libbed. I actually sold some pens.
But I felt so bad lying that I began telling people, "Don't buy
the fucking pens. The grandfather clock is made of corkboard."

We
became friends through music when I was in the band. He had already
done Valley Girl, Rumble Fish
and Cotton Club,
so I knew him as an actor. But I wasn't planning to be one. We just
hung out.

At the
parking garage of a local mall?

That's the story. We were messing around one night at the
Beverly
Center, having a giggle. We may have been drinking. We were goofing
around, and the story is that we wound up hanging by our fingers five
stories up on the parking structure. I don't remember, but I'm
thinking we did.

It
seems that there's something particularly postmodern about daredevil
acts at a mall.

It
was the ultimate death-defying white-trash act.

Cage arranged to get you a tryout for Elm
Street
and you were
well on your way.

But even after that first movie I
never thought
that there would be others. I didn't necessarily want there to be. I
wanted to play my guitar. But with the band broken up, I needed rent
money. I needed cigarettes.

After Elm Street you moved to 21
Jump
Street. You
reportedly detested the show that made you famous. Did you really
think 21 Jump Street was "fascist"?

Sure it was. Cops in school? I mean, bad things happen in
schools, but this was even worse than cops in school. It was preachy,
pointing the finger. And it was hypocritical because the people
running that show, the very highest of the higher-ups, were getting
high. They were getting loaded. And then to say, "Now kiddies,
don't do this" was horseshit. I was miserable living that lie
for three years. Mortified. I was getting loaded, too. Am I really
the one to say, "Don't get high"?

Did you try to get out of your contract?

I offered to do a year of the show
for free. I
hate sounding like, "Oh, I'm on television and they're paying me
a load of money, poor me," but I would have done two years for
free to get out of there. They were trying to turn me into Menudo,
into the New Kids on the Block. I couldn't play that game. I would
rather shrink back into everyday life than get stuck being that.

You must have
enjoyed
being America's dreamboat at least a little.

Not for one day. To enjoy lying? Enjoy being a piece of a
machine, the product of a huge assembly line? No. And fighting the
label of heartthrob is hard, too. By then I wanted to be an actor,
and that was impossible on TV.

Jump Street got you invited to the
Reagan
White
House.

Yeah, for a Just Say No event. That was the biggest joke of
all.
But I took my mom and she loved it. We watched all the
people—everyone acting so proper, trying to get close to the
president. We were desperate for coffee, but there was no coffee
allowed, no caffeine. People were putting away the booze, though. We
had a laugh.

Is your
mother a movie fan?

She
doesn't talk much about my movies, though she knows when I'm real,
when it's me at my most honest. She can sift through whatever
horseshit I might have thrown in there and find that. I took her to
the premiere of DonJuan and
we talked later. It was in
the anger, the flare-ups, and some of the sad moments when she could
see me.

Is she proud?

Sometimes she still looks at me and
says, "God,
can you believe your life? Going from living in a motel to all this?"
She's still a little shocked. So am I. I'm probably more shocked than
anyone. Being able to earn money making faces, telling lies! When it
all started about eight years ago, she was still a waitress. People,
customers, would say, "You're Johnny Depp's mom!" and she'd
be all proud. Then it took a turn, and now it's more uncomfortable.
Whom can you trust? Who's real and who's just smiling? I think she's
getting tired of it.

You've publicly ducked questions about you and
Brando, saying
the two
of you have never discussed acting.

We have talked about it. I think he
feels
compelled to tell me about his experiences, to offer advice. He has
said I should play Hamlet, for one thing. What I remember are scenes
we had in Don Juan. There are times when you're
trying to get
somewhere inside, but there's so much stuff going on around you—the
guy with the clapboard, the grip over there drinking coffee, the
director going "action"—that you're just not ready. He was
there for me then. He helps create an atmosphere that makes those
moments easier. Even if it's just by laughing, talking, looking at
you. He helped make scenes between the two of us totally private.

Sounds romantic.
Did
he moon you, too?

[Laughing] A
couple of times. I mooned
him back.

Seriously, Brando-wise—

All
the feelings are there: teacher and student, father and son. He's a
hero.

Were you
jealous when he kissed Larry King on TV?

He did kiss Larry King, didn't he? I
think it
was sweet. Maybe I should be jealous because I didn't kiss
Larry.

You have
another passion: collecting odd things. What's the latest?

There's a bug store in Paris off the
Boulevard
St. Germain. I love snooping around in there. I recently bought a
gift for a friend, a bug that looks shockingly like a leaf. The
veins, the coloring, all perfect. If this guy were in a tree, you
couldn't find him with a microscope—and that, to me, is a miracle.
How could evolution attain that disguise? Insects are fascinating.
You could never wipe them out. They're too fucking tough and too
smart.

What else? Do
you collect shrunken heads?

In Lima, Peru I bought an enormous, beautiful bat and two
dozen
lacquered, stuffed piranhas. Coming home through Customs was funny.
"What's in the box? . . . "Oh, 24 piranhas
and a bat."
"OK, strip-search this guy!"

Do you own anything that is ordinary?

I have a lot of pictures that kids
have sent me.
They are some of the best things—little kids really identify with
Edward Scissorhands, and they send me great,
pure-genius
pieces of art. Paintings of Edward, some of Sam in Benny
&
Joon—kids like Sam, too. They like the fairy tales. I frame
some
of those and put them on a wall in my house.

You also had a painting by serial killer John Wayne
Gacy. Why?

I'm fascinated by the dark and the
absurd. I'm
drawn to what's behind that. And don't we all have a bit of the
ambulance chaser in us? The Gacy painting is one he did in prison.
It's of Pogo the Clown, a character he used to play at neighborhood
get-togethers, family functions. Now, most people believed that Gacy
was a pillar of the community, a normal businessman, even as he
committed those horrible murders. I suppose what intrigues me is that
even after he was caught and put in prison, he was painting this
other image he had of himself—the nice guy who played the clown.

Do you think he
believed the nice-guy image?

I think he did, but he was driven by his sickness. Anyway, I
got
rid of it. I paid more than Gacys were going for and naively believed
the money went to the victims' families, which wasn't true. I gave
the thing away. I didn't want it around anymore.

What else gives you the creeps?

I used to have a nightmare that I was
being
chased through bushes and fronds by the skipper from Gilligan's
Island. I don't know what was on his mind, but it wasn't
good and
I didn't want anything to do with it. As a kid I was also afraid of
John Davidson.

The TV crooner?

Yeah. I'd
see him on television when I was younger, and it was that thing that
scared me—the smile that was always there. The Man Who Always
Smiles. That was frightening because it's not real. You knew he might
have been feeling like shit, might have wanted to kill somebody, but
this was his persona, to smile. And it's not just him. That thing is
everywhere.

Politicians—

Every
politician is John Davidson. Eight out of ten producers are John
Davidson. I know directors and loads of actors who are John Davidson.

How about you? Have
you ever been a Davidson?

[Nods]
There are times when
you put on a smile. It's a fucking drag, but you mask your feelings
because there's nothing else to do. For instance, you're giving an
interview and the guy says, "How are you?" You can't say,
"I feel fucking rotten, I don't enjoy this shit and I would
really like to strangle you."

Uh-oh.

Strangling
is an extreme example. But here's a John Davidson spot—being a
presenter at the Academy Awards. I did that in 1994. I haven't seen
it, but people tell me it went OK. My face was probably frozen in
fear, because there's a weird marionette artificiality to those
things. Backstage all I could think was, How do I get out of this? I
absolutely almost fled. I had a few options swimming around in my
brain. Just collapse, fall over unconscious, that was one. Projectile
vomiting. Another option was to tell the truth. Just say, "Before
I introduce Neil Young I want to say that I don't know why I'm here.
I don't want to be here. I just want to go have a drink. I feel
nervous and a little bit sick." Of course, I wasn't actually
going to go out and say that. But what was really eating away at me
was this: What if I suddenly get Tourette's syndrome? What if I go
out and start barking and saying motherfucker to the whole world?

But you did
introduce
Neil Young and get out of there safely.

That was a good cigarette after that.

Wasn't there a time you had a quasi-Tourette's
episode on a
plane?

Flying
from L.A. to Vancouver for that television show [21 Jump Street].
I was in first class and something came over me. I was already shaky
about the flight when it hit me—you have to shout something
shocking. Blurt something, or horrible things will happen.

So then you yelled, "I fuck animals!"

Yeah.

And, indeed,
the plane didn't crash.

It worked.

You even faced down your fear of John Davidson,
didn't you? He
played
a talk show host in Edward Scissorhands.

I had nothing to do with that. It was
strange to
work with him after years of being afraid of him. He was doing
Oklahoma! somewhere at the time and he had a perm.

How John Davidson of him.

So I got rid of that demon. It was a
weird
exorcism. We talked about his perm.

You've had other demons. There was a guy who kept
calling
around town
insisting he was you. He said you were an impostor who had stolen his
identity.

Sick.
Scary. It was like the ultimate Dungeons & Dragons game, and I
was the enemy.

He
called the studio demanding the money he had made for Scissorhands.
That was funny to a lot of people. Was it funny to you?

It makes you think. I've had other threats, too, and what
hits
you is that these people believe they're right. They can justify
their hatred of you because in their world, you are the enemy. It
makes you rethink your job when you realize you can affect someone so
intensely. So to me, they're not evil.

Stalkers and kooks aren't evil?

They think their hate is justified.

How can you sleep?

I'm
cautious but not really paranoid. I carry a gun. Not today, but when
there are threats I carry a gun. I grew up around them and I can
shoot a little. I could never kill an animal, but I always liked
target practice. Now I have a couple of Winchesters, a couple of
.380s and a .38. Because basically, who wants to have a bunch of
bodyguards? I don't see myself with that kind of star treatment. I'd
rather bounce around on my own. But at the same time, when there's
someone out there who actually wants to take your life, you should
try to be ready.

Being stalked must darken your view of human nature.

I never had the brightest view of human nature. I think
humanity—society, at least—is violent. It's not getting any better.
I don't think I'm cynical, but I do think maybe the world is
more...sinful than ever before.

Does that feeling find its way into your work?

It must. It's a sense that the world is harsh to some people.
Harsh, judgmental and wrong.

Your movie misfits often fight back in funny ways.
There's a
story
that you insisted on filming an alternate line in Benny
& Joon at the climax of the love story.

That's true. It's right when the music comes up and he looks
into
her eyes. The line is, "Joon, I love you."

And your line was—

"Joon, I'm a bed wetter." I'm still
passionate about that line. I didn't get away with it, but I think it
could have gotten a laugh and been touching at the same time. You
can't help laughing at the pain of this poor bastard, but he's
honest. And more than that...it's easy to say "I love you."
The audience expects it. But to say you're a bed wetter, to reveal
something like that, is saying I love you. It's saying I really love
you, enough to tell you my deep, dark secret.

Do you have a favorite date movie?

Wuthering Heights with Olivier is a real
tearjerker. Or
Mike Leigh's film Naked. You won't forget that one.

How does porn affect you?

I like a porn film now and again, but
I don't go
out of my way to see one. I saw Edward Penis Hands.
Tim Burton
sent me a copy. It is a great film, really funny. As for most of it,
I suppose it's arousing to some people, but I get a little
embarrassed watching people fuck. You're sitting there watching and
suddenly it seems so strange—the image changes in your mind and
they're not people anymore. The guy looks like a dog, making horrible
faces. I'm sure there are beautiful porn films, artistically made. I
just don't want to see that guy.

How about love scenes in your own films? Are they
arousing?

I've never done a love scene that was arousing. The
atmosphere is
too ridiculous. You're lying there kissing some girl, professing your
undying love, and you see that grip over there eating a bologna
sandwich.

You've never
had a boner on-screen?

Oh, I may have had a boner, but not
in a love scene.

You'd better explain.

Who
knows what goes on underneath the table, outside the frame? I may
have a feather duster down my pants. It's not necessarily sexual,
either. If I'm having a difficult time with a scene, getting too
serious, I like to take a handheld duster or maybe a wrench, shove it
down my pants and play the scene that way. Any object that doesn't
belong—it takes your mind off the seriousness of the situation. Just
when you're bursting into tears you realize there's a dust mop in
your shorts.

So there
are multiple tracks in your head. One's in character while another is
sending out dust mop alerts.

Yeah, and the other actor knows, too. That can add spice to
the
scene. I've used tools, fruit, a little squeegee that creates the
sound of flatulence. It doesn't have to be in your pants, either. In
a close shot where they cut you off at the elbows, say, I may have a
banana in my hand, or some guy's shoe.

This from the man Brando wants to play Hamlet. What
else can
you tell
us about acting?

Sometimes you hate it. So maybe you
say, Yeah, I
make faces for cash, I tell a few lies. And in a way that's right. In
a way it's just a gig like any other job. Except it's more unstable,
maybe worse for your mental health. If you're doing what you should
be doing as an actor, you won't be very emotionally stable. You are
constantly manipulating your emotions, fucking with yourself, fucking
with your self, opening drawers in your head that
you don't
really want to open but you have to, to maintain access to them.

What drawers?

Family things. Childhood things. Fear and abandonment. Rage.
You just
feel stupid having this be a part of your job, and it fucks with you
in bad ways. When you're really flopping around in there [bitter
laugh], you feel like an idiot for doing it. For going
through
it. It can make you miserable for three or four months. But you do
it. You feel like an idiot, but you do it because it's your fucking
job.

You're talking
about What's Eating Gilbert Grape, a movie that
struck close
to home. Gilbert, your character, was trapped in a working-class
family, but he had infinite longings.

That's one I haven't seen, Gilbert Grape.

You still don't want to?

No, no. That mixed-up family and him being responsible, those
issues clung to me. Making that movie was a bad time. I was as deep
in the soup as I could be.

According to the tabloids you were hurting because of
your
breakup
with Winona Ryder.

That wasn't really it. That's what was written, but we hadn't
broken up yet, we were still up and down. It had more to do with me,
with the difficulty of being inside my skin. I was doing what I could
to numb that feeling, doing some in-depth poisoning.

What were your poisons?

Pretty much anything I could ingest. And I was soused,
drinking
heavily, really doing myself in. When it gets constant, when you're
going to sleep drunk, waking up and starting to drink again, that
stuff will try to kill you.

Did you think your vices would actually kill you?

At one point I was living on coffee
and
cigarettes, no food, no sleep. I was sitting around with some pals
when my heart started running at 200 beats a minute. That's scary.
You're mentally trying to slow down your heart, but you can't. It's
like being on a plane when the bottom drops out—you drop a couple
thousand feet and one second turns into eternity. You really do get
all those family pictures in your head. And you feel so totally
fucking alone. I was thinking of my grandfather on my mom's side, a
great man I worshiped. His heart just exploded one day. When my heart
started racing I hoped it was an anxiety attack, but when it went on
for 45 minutes I knew it wasn't anxiety, it was all the shit I'd done
to my body. My friends got me to the hospital, where I got a
shot—boom, a shot that basically stops your heart for a second. I
could feel myself curling up, going fetal. Then it was over. I got to
go home. Now, there's an experience that'll scare you into shape.

Did you swear off
drugs and alcohol?

Well, I'm a little thick so it took a
while. I
eventually curbed my drinking. A few beers or a couple glasses of
wine, that's not abuse.

Is drug use always harmful?

It depends on the drug and the person. Some kids escape into
sports. Some people go to the movies. Some escape with drugs. There's
one school of thought that drugs are recreational; there's another
school of thought that they can be therapeutic, a way to deal with
problems. I think they're usually a crutch, a way to avoid problems.
I have never known a junkie who got away, never seen one that heroin
didn't get. But it always depends on the drug, doesn't it? Reefer,
obviously, is fine. I have never seen a guy smoke a joint and get so
stoned he had to beat the shit out of someone.

What about sex crimes? What did you think when you
heard about
Hugh
Grant's misdemeanor near Sunset Boulevard?

I felt bad for the guy and terrible for Elizabeth Hurley, for
their global embarrassment. But I could see how it happened, too. To
be honest, what he was busted for—isn't that what most men want?
Whether it's with your wife, your girlfriend or any female, don't we
think of that? Ninety-seven percent of men around the world probably
do, or want to do, the same thing. But they don't get caught, or if
they do it's not a worldwide affair. As for the way he went about it,
I have to say I don't know where his mind was, but was it worth the
attention it got? If something that bizarre had happened to me, I
think I would have laughed and laughed.

You had a Hollywood Babylon moment of your own in Don
Juan
when you played a scene with 250 naked women. Is it possible to
appreciate 250 nude women at once?

Your brain won't acknowledge it. It's too much. You can't
process
the fact that these women are real and three-dimensional. It's like a
huge painting—you can't appreciate all the details at the same time.

Do you think there's
a perceptual limit to the number of nude women a guy can process?

The trouble for me
is that I have one bad eye, so there go 125 right there. You might do
better. I'd say I can deal with something in the 30s, 30 to
39.

How is a screen
kiss different from a real kiss? Do you try different ones the way
actors work through various line readings?

I don't work that way. I think it's awful when people plan
how to
say something. That's the wrong approach because it's never real. The
same applies to kissing. I try to kiss normally. But there are times
when the other person isn't comfortable or you aren't, so you fake it
[miming a near-miss kiss] with a movie kiss. Maybe
we should
always do that; it's not wise to run around kissing people. It's not
hygienically sound. You don't know where they were the night before
and they sure don't know where you were. But a movie kiss is never
like a real kiss, where there's love involved. It takes emotion to
turn a kiss into something wonderful.

Is sex more demanding for a movie Romeo? Have you
ever been
accused
of being less than stellar in bed?

[Laughing] Never.
Of course, I've never
been called stellar, either.

If you were forced to star in a TV show, which one
would you
choose?

There's an English show I love called Whose Line Is
It Anyway?
It's all improvisation. Brilliant, quick, clever comics—spontaneity
with
both barrels. I wish I could do that show.

Why don't you call them?

No, no. I respect that show far too
much to be
on it. I wish I were together enough to do what they do, but it's not
going to happen, not in this life.

We've talked about your past exposure to
fire-and-brimstone
religion.
Do you have a faith now?

Nothing with a name. I haven't found
that, but I
hope there's something else out there. I hope that when we leave this
world we go on a little trip. Why not? Countless people have had
near-death experiences and have come back to say they saw interesting
things. Nobody returns from the dead and says, "Hey, there's
nothing else." And while there's no organized religion I agree
with, I think the Bible is a very good book. Probably a novel.

Do you ever pray?

I pray on airplanes. I get instant religion during takeoff,
then when we're
safely in the air I sit there thinking about the fact that any little
thing that goes wrong could send us crashing to the ground.

Pop quiz: Other than
Kate, Brando and all of your other famous friends, who have you
learned from in Hollywood?

Craft services.

The people who do the catering on movie sets?

Those people are pros. I have learned a lot from craft
services.
How to make dips. Tricks for keeping things fresh. It's not just
Tupperware—you can put vegetables out on a platter, fine, but
they'll last a lot longer on a bed of crushed ice. I recently learned
to make a fine seviche. I can cook, too.

What do you cook?

I've made some pretty good beef stew
in my day.
I'm good at French toast. But most of all, I cook pork like a
magician. You're looking at a guy who cooks a fine plate of bacon.

What's the secret
with bacon?

Frequent
flipping. You have to even it out on both sides. And don't use a high
flame. Take your time. You need patience with bacon. You have to
maintain a calm attitude with pork.

Cooking for Kate Moss—that in itself would be a
high-profile
job.

I cook for a
supermodel. And contrary to what's been written about Kate, she has a
healthy appetite. That girl can put away a plate of bacon.

Not the most healthful diet.

I'm not sure I could give up pork. Steak, OK. Maybe
hamburgers.
But nothing in the world can make me stop eating swine. I mean, I had
a great-grandmother, Mimmy, who ate the greasiest food you ever saw
and chewed tobacco till the day she died, and she lived to be 102.

What did you learn
from her?

I learned
that I never want to see a spittoon again as long as I live. I have
vivid memories of fetching Mimmy's spittoon, and it was nasty in
there. Not only tobacco juice but toenails too. She'd put her toenail
clippings in there and they looked just like cashews. To this day I
can't eat cashews.

You've played Ed Wood and Don Juan. Any other notable
characters you
want to play?

Le Petomane.

You speak, of course, of the noted Parisian cabaret
performer
of the
turn of the century, the fartiste who tooted grand
opera from
his anus—the original classical gas?

You have to admire anyone with such
great
control of his . . . instrument. I'd love to
play him. I'm sure there
were tragic moments in his life. It's tragic that he left no
successors. But what a hysterical scene when he discovers his gift.
That's a role I'd do in a minute.

Forgetting your "quote-unquote career" for a moment,
do you
ever think about your legacy? Film stock lasts; people will still be
seeing you 100 years from now.